Right, Wrong, and Other Misconceptions
In my life experience, I’ve found that, as satisfying as it may be, setting things that one dislikes on fire is rarely the proper way to resolve a conflict.
I am absolutely against the idea of censorship. As I once found scrawled in code on the bottom of a dead man’s shoe: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
Simple words cannot have any moral alignment, nor hold sway over our own opinions, beliefs, or prejudices. Yet, their message can.
If you have ever bought something because an advertisement told you so,
If you have ever changed your mind because your friend talked you out of it,
If you have ever been inspired by a novel, or poem, or particularly thrilling recipe,
Then you are proof that messages can change minds.
We live in a world where we are constantly (buy Pepsi!) bombarded with (you need a Roomba) messages (Maybe it’s Maybelline). This does not seem likely to change in the near future. So perhaps developing the ability to hold to our own principles and think critically about new ones is a necessity.
Censorship means admitting that we think ourselves too fragile to resist the messages being spewed at us continuously. Like Hill, I find this pretense of protection hypocritical. As he quotes from Charles Rembar: “I never heard a prosecutor or a condemning judge announce that his moral fibre had been injured by the book in question. It was always someone else’s moral fibre for which the anxiety was felt.” What censorship is doing is not protecting the vulnerable from frightening ideas and vulgar words, but instead filtering the information that they receive through a lens of what someone else deems correct.
Ideas should not be judged as correct or incorrect. Each should have the chance to prove itself and the one with the most merit should be the one that is believed. Censorship is not a shield, but a brick wall that takes away the opportunity for us to consider other opinions and select the one that aligns most with our own experiences and morals.
To let someone choose the content that we are allowed is to let them make the decision of what is correct and acceptable and what is to be condemned. None should be given that power, because there is no measure of correctness that everyone could agree upon. Some think an almighty being created us, some believe it was an exploding space rock. Some believe that love is exclusively between those of different genders and some think that skin tone or gender has any effect on a person’s worth. Some think the earth is flat. Some believe that brussel sprouts are gross.
Obviously, I have my own beliefs on what is right and wrong, but that does not mean that I am so fragile as to need to be blissfully unaware of what others think is correct. Even though I disagree with some opinions, and find others outright offensive, this does not mean I would rather not know that they exist. To put it simply, I would like the choice between deciding if life came from almighty being or exploding space rock.
Ideas need to be discussed, disputed, disagreed upon, but never silenced. Yes, some ideas are offensive or ignorant, but shutting them up is not the answer. Only by challenging the ideas we find wrong can we discuss them and change minds. Ideas need to be contested using logic and contrasted to determine which has more merit.
We cannot simply base our beliefs on what survived the fire.
- A.M. Ham
